t3knomanser:Harry_Seldon: In reality, the average Paleolithic human was a lot smarter than the average human today.

There's really no evidence to support that. Based on physiology, since we have no written records to go on, Paleolithic humans and modern humans probably have about the same intelligence. This is what you'd expect, since evolution is a very slow process.

t3knomanser:And that's before we look at the serious shiat, like laser sintering. That's not going to happen in the home (the home workshop maybe, but high energy lasers are dangerous tools). NASA is already producing certain classes of single-use items this way, because it provides finer control and higher build quality than conventional manufacturing.

When I think of 3D printers I get really excited about space applications. We've known for a while now that really economic space travel isn't going to go anywhere until we're able to fabricate things in space with materials from space (i.e. captured asteroids or the moon). I think of trying to move something as simple as a machine shop into space and it seems impossible, but a team of 3D printers could fab a huge array parts. You could just shoot the superstructure and computers into space, and then fill in the rest of the ship with parts fabricated in space.

It'd be a huge win, considering it's multiple tens of thousands of dollars to send a single pound of materiel into orbit, much less to escape velocity.

Quantum Apostrophe:I'm not keen on the kind of delusion drivel like you posted. 25 years ago we were all supposed to have nanotechnological assemblers in every home. Now we just call finely ground powder "nano". Yay. Fifteen years ago we were all supposed to wear 3D goggles and all live in cyberspace. Now we are supposed to have this magical device in every home that's just like a Star Trek replicator.

There's a certain class of futurists that pull all kinds of crap out of their behinds based on a plausible technology and a plausible payoff. I'd argue that 3D printing technology goes beyond plausible into proven- you have lots of 3D printing machines on the market that are coming down in price and expanding their capacity, and (though I don't have a lot of experience with them) they seem to do their job pretty well. You also have a proven payoff- especially in certain types of workshops and prototyping labs. Those two alone will ensure that 3D printing is going to be a realistic technology going forward.

We don't yet have a proven method for putting 3D printers in homes economically, but I see a lot of people with ideas that are at least plausible, and some of them seem to warrant more merit than that.

Fubini:t3knomanser: And that's before we look at the serious shiat, like laser sintering. That's not going to happen in the home (the home workshop maybe, but high energy lasers are dangerous tools). NASA is already producing certain classes of single-use items this way, because it provides finer control and higher build quality than conventional manufacturing.

When I think of 3D printers I get really excited about space applications. We've known for a while now that really economic space travel isn't going to go anywhere until we're able to fabricate things in space with materials from space (i.e. captured asteroids or the moon). I think of trying to move something as simple as a machine shop into space and it seems impossible, but a team of 3D printers could fab a huge array parts. You could just shoot the superstructure and computers into space, and then fill in the rest of the ship with parts fabricated in space.

It'd be a huge win, considering it's multiple tens of thousands of dollars to send a single pound of materiel into orbit, much less to escape velocity.

Nah...the Shuttle was the most expensive means of lofting stuff into orbit, and it *only* cost about $10,000 a pound. (Source) NASA biggest current project is funding all these non-governmental rockets in an effort to lower that cost by 100-fold, down to $100/lb by 2025. That's when we can start building an ISS-2 that spins for gravity and will allow years-long space exploration projects. It will be built by 3D printers at least in part, too. The next 100 years in space are going to be awesome, and the best is yet to come.

Not yet, but you'll need it to print the next generation of printers, which take waste matter and reconstitute it to form food. Hungry? No food in the house? Don't worry, there's a couple of unpaid bill demand letters, and an old sock you want to throw away. Stick it in the machine, select "pizza" and wait as it re-orients the atoms and molecules and builds you a hot, but probably quite small, pizza.

I wonder if that will ever be possible in a home environment... I hope so. I also hope QA doesn't read this post. Something tells me he isn't keen on 3d printing.

I'm all in favor of the post scarcity era, but it's going to drive the world mad when you don't need factories to produce consumer goods, but the only thing you'll need is enough space to collect the solar to power the machines. You could probably make a thousand PhD's in economics studying the effects of that change.

loonatic112358:GAT_00: We can't put a man on the moon. The Orion project can't make it to the Moon, and nothing else currently existing comes close.

That's due to people frowning on using nuclear explosives as a propulsion method

More importantly, there is no need to go to the moon just now. By the time we can afford it (see my comments above about lowering the cost-to-orbit) we'll be able to afford to do it on a go-and-stay basis, really launching the space age, instead of the mainly stunts we've been indulging in for the past 40 years.

Not yet, but you'll need it to print the next generation of printers, which take waste matter and reconstitute it to form food. Hungry? No food in the house? Don't worry, there's a couple of unpaid bill demand letters, and an old sock you want to throw away. Stick it in the machine, select "pizza" and wait as it re-orients the atoms and molecules and builds you a hot, but probably quite small, pizza.

I wonder if that will ever be possible in a home environment... I hope so. I also hope QA doesn't read this post. Something tells me he isn't keen on 3d printing.

I'm not keen on the kind of delusion drivel like you posted. 25 years ago we were all supposed to have nanotechnological assemblers in every home. Now we just call finely ground powder "nano". Yay. Fifteen years ago we were all supposed to wear 3D goggles and all live in cyberspace. Now we are supposed to have this magical device in every home that's just like a Star Trek replicator.

The common thread here is that engineering and manufacturing are pretty mature and very complex fields of study that don't lend themselves well to vast improvements anymore. We've looked into it already.

The 3D printer you are looking for is called an "urban garden". You compost your organic waste, shovel it into the garden and plant seeds.

Biology is several orders of magnitude ahead of us in "3D printing". Self-assembling, self-replicating perpetual patterns encoded in matter, driven by sunlight, called "seeds".

It's a lot less glamorous than that leaky 50$ Yoda coffee cup you just "made" with your 1500$ glue gun, but there you have my position on the whole 3D printing mass delusion.

I didn't read anything you wrote, but the largest indicator that 3d printing is really taking of is that there are Fark trolls that specialize in the topic.

wildcardjack:I'm all in favor of the post scarcity era, but it's going to drive the world mad when you don't need factories to produce consumer goods, but the only thing you'll need is enough space to collect the solar to power the machines. You could probably make a thousand PhD's in economics studying the effects of that change.

Current desktop 3d printers run off a 200w PC power supply. That's the output of three standard rooftop PV panels.

FWIW, you're dead on about all of that. The main reason why people get so upset about being called on this bullshiat is that it's depressing as f*ck to know that this is about as good as it gets. I don't like waking up every morning with the knowledge that I will never be able to walk under an alien sun, or directly jack into cyberspace with some kind of neural implant, or have nanobots crawling through my bloodstream clearing out plaque and viruses. I want to believe that Moore's Law can apply to all technology, forever, ad infinitum.

HenryFnord:This is an innovative and amazing opportunity for everyman to work against planned obsolescence. It's only a matter of time before the large corporations use DMCA to prevent replicating replacement parts.

I don't think the corporations have anything to fear for quite a while yet. Printing a shoddy, half-melted plastic trinket from a Makerbot is a long, long way from being able to print your own razorblades or other useful items. In any case, the plastic junk you get out of consumer-level 3d printers is not likely to be any more durable than what is injection-molded for pennies in China.

Not yet, but you'll need it to print the next generation of printers, which take waste matter and reconstitute it to form food. Hungry? No food in the house? Don't worry, there's a couple of unpaid bill demand letters, and an old sock you want to throw away. Stick it in the machine, select "pizza" and wait as it re-orients the atoms and molecules and builds you a hot, but probably quite small, pizza.

I wonder if that will ever be possible in a home environment... I hope so. I also hope QA doesn't read this post. Something tells me he isn't keen on 3d printing.

I'm not keen on the kind of delusion drivel like you posted. 25 years ago we were all supposed to have nanotechnological assemblers in every home. Now we just call finely ground powder "nano". Yay. Fifteen years ago we were all supposed to wear 3D goggles and all live in cyberspace. Now we are supposed to have this magical device in every home that's just like a Star Trek replicator.

The common thread here is that engineering and manufacturing are pretty mature and very complex fields of study that don't lend themselves well to vast improvements anymore. We've looked into it already.

The 3D printer you are looking for is called an "urban garden". You compost your organic waste, shovel it into the garden and plant seeds.

Biology is several orders of magnitude ahead of us in "3D printing". Self-assembling, self-replicating perpetual patterns encoded in matter, driven by sunlight, called "seeds".

It's a lot less glamorous than that leaky 50$ Yoda coffee cup you just "made" with your 1500$ glue gun, but there you have my position on the whole 3D printing mass delusion.

Sure, put a 3D printer in every home for a few hundred, but just wait til you have to replace the plastic cartridge. That'll cost you a few thousand. And of course the one it ships with is only half full right from the factory. Then you add in Red/Yellow/Blue cartridges that all need to be bought separately and cost an arm and a leg. Soon they'll be giving away 3D printers with a new PC purchase where the plastic cartridges cost more than the printer.

I don't claim to be an expert but it looks like 3-D printers have a future - hell, a present - in biotech.

Additive manufacturing is the go-to tech for artificial hips. They're the sort of item that is much better when made specific to an individual. There was also an article on Fark the other day about using 3-d printers to create molds to grow artificial organic ears.

Willas Tyrell:No interest in being able to make my own plastic flatware

Speak for yourself.I don't think 3d printing will be in every home, but I do think it will find a place in millions of garages.You've got countless craftsmen and tinkerers who would happily use this technology to produce trinkets and bits for their projects. Being able to take a design off the internet and personalize it (beyond just adding a monogram) is a hell of a powerful thing.

I think the roadblock right now is complexity more than cost.People just aren't familiar with the tool, but everyone's got stuff they want to make.

They've had 3D chocolate printers for at least a year now. For chocolate and frosting, the temperatures are lower than for the various plastics. On the higher temperature ranges, they're starting to handle nylon, and someone recently demonstrated a 3D printer that uses solar power to melt glass and use that in a 3D printer.

Not yet, but you'll need it to print the next generation of printers, which take waste matter and reconstitute it to form food. Hungry? No food in the house? Don't worry, there's a couple of unpaid bill demand letters, and an old sock you want to throw away. Stick it in the machine, select "pizza" and wait as it re-orients the atoms and molecules and builds you a hot, but probably quite small, pizza.

I wonder if that will ever be possible in a home environment... I hope so. I also hope QA doesn't read this post. Something tells me he isn't keen on 3d printing.

HotWingAgenda:Quantum Apostrophe: there you have my position on the whole 3D printing mass delusion.

FWIW, you're dead on about all of that. The main reason why people get so upset about being called on this bullshiat is that it's depressing as f*ck to know that this is about as good as it gets. I don't like waking up every morning with the knowledge that I will never be able to walk under an alien sun, or directly jack into cyberspace with some kind of neural implant, or have nanobots crawling through my bloodstream clearing out plaque and viruses. I want to believe that Moore's Law can apply to all technology, forever, ad infinitum.

Or maybe... the smart deviants were already everywhere at once -- not the majority, but a decent size of the population -- and the only reason why they didn't do anything back in cave man days was because they spent 99.99% of their waking energy looking for their next meal (the other 00.001% was spent on sex). So when the total mass knowledge and intelligence of the human race is wasted on finding, procuring, preparing and ingesting food, high concepts like art and science tend to not get done.

But as soon as agriculture (and animal domestication) came along, suddenly man could stay in one place and grow/raise more food that he could possibly eat rather than wander around all the time wasting his precious waking energy on hunting. Populations supported by food and wealth booms could thus pursue non-sustenance related activities. From this excess free time came philosophy, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, law, science, music, medicine, art, theatre, writing, trade, language - in short, civilization and all the abstract conceptualizations and liberal arts crap that we enjoy today.

The pace of technological progress is all about food. The less people we have siphoned off for food production, the faster we progress in everything else:

10,000 years ago, 100% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the tribe.5,000 years ago, 80% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the city-state.1,000 years ago, 60% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the kingdom.200 years ago, 40% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the country.Today, less than 10% of our population actively work on feeding the rest of us.

It's not about spreading knowledge or even access to it, it's about idle time.

Scott Adams is right about some things, but he is appallingly ignorant about other things (unless he's trying to be funny here, in which case he failed at both).

pyrotek85:Iplaybass: Vodka Zombie: Because I have absolutely no use for one?

This. It's a cool idea but the vast majority of people have no need for one. Even if they did, they wouldn't know how to use it.

That's probably what computer scientists said when they scoffed at the idea of a home computer that your average person could use. Yes, the tech is still in it's infancy, but this really could be a common place appliance someday. It has to start somewhere.

And light bulbs and automobiles and telephones and microwaves and cell phones and the internet...

Not yet, but you'll need it to print the next generation of printers, which take waste matter and reconstitute it to form food. Hungry? No food in the house? Don't worry, there's a couple of unpaid bill demand letters, and an old sock you want to throw away. Stick it in the machine, select "pizza" and wait as it re-orients the atoms and molecules and builds you a hot, but probably quite small, pizza.

I wonder if that will ever be possible in a home environment... I hope so. I also hope QA doesn't read this post. Something tells me he isn't keen on 3d printing.

I'm not keen on the kind of delusion drivel like you posted. 25 years ago we were all supposed to have nanotechnological assemblers in every home. Now we just call finely ground powder "nano". Yay. Fifteen years ago we were all supposed to wear 3D goggles and all live in cyberspace. Now we are supposed to have this magical device in every home that's just like a Star Trek replicator.

The common thread here is that engineering and manufacturing are pretty mature and very complex fields of study that don't lend themselves well to vast improvements anymore. We've looked into it already.

The 3D printer you are looking for is called an "urban garden". You compost your organic waste, shovel it into the garden and plant seeds.

Biology is several orders of magnitude ahead of us in "3D printing". Self-assembling, self-replicating perpetual patterns encoded in matter, driven by sunlight, called "seeds".

It's a lot less glamorous than that leaky 50$ Yoda coffee cup you just "made" with your 1500$ glue gun, but there you have my position on the whole 3D printing mass delusion.

I knew you'd show up. I missed you! x. Did you miss me? :D

I've often thought that your problem is you misunderstand. I am not saying this will happen tomorrow, or even in my lifetime. I put no time frame on it, i'm not a futurist making predictions. I also said "I wonder if that will ever be possible", so it's not really a delusion. It could happen in a hundred years or a thousand years, but I think that with the direction technology is going with subatomic manipulation it'll become easier and easier to do, just like all things when first discovered. You start with a million dollar experiment, then you refine it and improve techniques and suddenly you're selling it for $3 a time. That's undeniable, that's the way we progress.

Also you think that we've hit the peak, and nothing can improve now. The last 100 years have seen a rapid change in everything, and the rate of change is accelerating. I'm not interested in what someone said to you 25 years ago, this is another common theme with you, you always hark back to what people were saying decades ago, as if that matters. In fact knowing you you probably misunderstood them as well. In 30 years you'll be telling your great grandchildren "There was this idiot on Fark, Sucksal or something I don't know, who was making bold predictions confidently claiming that we'd be living on Alpha Centaurii, eating 3d printed food by now. That's what he said! What an idiot!". Of course that isn't what I said, but your responses make me think that that's what your brain translates what I said into.

I just think that we are on an inexorable march of progress, and all things are possible if our minds are not backwards. Except fundamental laws of nature, but I don't think 3d printing goes against any laws of nature, and it is already happening.

That's another thing that you seem to think makes something easy to dismiss. "The first generation of something isn't perfect therefore scrap it it's a useless pipedream and you're all idiots." Yeah, the first load of stuff may be easy to dismiss as plastic cups made with a glue gun, but you're a fool if you think that's as good as the systems and technology will get. It will be refined and improved, and the quality of the output will be improved.

Of course this is all a moot point because to preserve the economy and our way of life they will be banned.

MayoSlather:As a consumer device it could come preloaded with all sorts of household objects, kitchen utensils, tools, toys, containers etc.

Think like a businessman. It would come with a wireless card and it would talk to the iPrintBot store. There'd be lots of free models, but the good ones would all cost a couple of bucks.

Also, the consumer 3D printer won't be an FDM printer. I hate to agree with QuantumAsshat, but FDM printers are just glue guns on CNC gantries. Fortunately, there are better technologies equally suitable for home use (while a metal sinterer will never happen in a consumer device, there are low power laser sinterers suitable for plastic and resin).

Groundbreaking ideas sometimes take time to become useful. Hedy Lamarr co-invented frequency hopping as a low-latency "encrypted" communications mechanism in 1941. In the past ten years, "all of a sudden" we have spread spectrum frequency hopping in WiFi and every frickin wireless phone on the planet.

Ditto computers that started with relays, then went to tubes, then went to transistors, then went to ICs, and by the mid-70s, hobbyists could buy a CPU for just a few hundred dollars. Then, BAM!

Now we have $20 Arduinos, coupled with inexpensive digital servos, manufacturing processes that make gears and motors with great precision, and processes to make suitable materials with consistent quality, and all of a sudden, hobbyists can buy a frickin CNC framework with really amazing glue guns. Just as you could be hard-pressed to envision everyone carrying a computer, phone and camera in their pockets in the late 70s (outside the realm of science fiction), it's difficult to see how 3D printing will change everything.

I'll admit that I just ordered a clumsy glue-gun on a cheap CNC frame because I want to make gears, supports and armatures for my laughably lame robots, but ... here's a girl with prosthetic arms made by a 3D printer that are inexpensive enough that she can get new ones as she continues to grow. That's kinda cool.

mofa:Groundbreaking ideas sometimes take time to become useful. Hedy Lamarr co-invented frequency hopping as a low-latency "encrypted" communications mechanism in 1941. In the past ten years, "all of a sudden" we have spread spectrum frequency hopping in WiFi and every frickin wireless phone on the planet.

Ditto computers that started with relays, then went to tubes, then went to transistors, then went to ICs, and by the mid-70s, hobbyists could buy a CPU for just a few hundred dollars. Then, BAM!

Now we have $20 Arduinos, coupled with inexpensive digital servos, manufacturing processes that make gears and motors with great precision, and processes to make suitable materials with consistent quality, and all of a sudden, hobbyists can buy a frickin CNC framework with really amazing glue guns. Just as you could be hard-pressed to envision everyone carrying a computer, phone and camera in their pockets in the late 70s (outside the realm of science fiction), it's difficult to see how 3D printing will change everything.

I'll admit that I just ordered a clumsy glue-gun on a cheap CNC frame because I want to make gears, supports and armatures for my laughably lame robots, but ... here's a girl with prosthetic arms made by a 3D printer that are inexpensive enough that she can get new ones as she continues to grow. That's kinda cool.

Short version? Moore's Law is going to make a mockery of the nay sayers the same way it did those who dissed early PCs.

Not yet, as we are still evaluating which one to buy, but it'll happen soon. My business specializes in prototyping for Silicon Valley high tech companies and others here in the Bay Area, so we already have CAD and CAM skills, a large-format CNC milling station, etc. Our projected initial use is to rapidly print low cost parts to prove fitment before going final.

3d printers are pretty awesome, and i've done some research into getting one

but the idea everybody will buy one and print their own stuff is dumb, it'll be like websites or photography or wood carving or drawing or etc. anything that requires enough work that somebody might pay somebody else to do it will become dominated by service businesses

i mean most people still don't like cooking for themselves, and that's farking food son

AdamK:3d printers are pretty awesome, and i've done some research into getting one

but the idea everybody will buy one and print their own stuff is dumb, it'll be like websites or photography or wood carving or drawing or etc. anything that requires enough work that somebody might pay somebody else to do it will become dominated by service businesses

i mean most people still don't like cooking for themselves, and that's farking food son

People also don't like waiting for shiat.A few hours on the printer is better than a day or two by fedex.

AdamK:3d printers are pretty awesome, and i've done some research into getting one

but the idea everybody will buy one and print their own stuff is dumb, it'll be like websites or photography or wood carving or drawing or etc. anything that requires enough work that somebody might pay somebody else to do it will become dominated by service businesses

i mean most people still don't like cooking for themselves, and that's farking food son

Which is why they'll download blueprints/schematics from people who design for these new printers. Like web design, we'll create entire markets for those who are skilled in creation in this new medium, and sell them. Then you can pop in your own customizable edits, and print out your product.

way south:AdamK: 3d printers are pretty awesome, and i've done some research into getting one

but the idea everybody will buy one and print their own stuff is dumb, it'll be like websites or photography or wood carving or drawing or etc. anything that requires enough work that somebody might pay somebody else to do it will become dominated by service businesses

i mean most people still don't like cooking for themselves, and that's farking food son

People also don't like waiting for shiat.A few hours on the printer is better than a day or two by fedex.

I can even imagine local shops that have high end printers and for a small fee you send whatever you want to them and they print and you go pickup that day.

They're neat and occasionally useful, but in my experience it's a arbitrary-length PCB standoff maker and weird-shaped mounting bracket machine. Other than that, it excels at collecting dust. The big-ass industrial ones are a different story, of course.

I think the reasonable explanation is the same as large-format printers. They'll come down in price and up in quality to the point where a hobbyist can get their hands on an decent entry level one, small businesses can get a decent one, and your occasional user will just head over to their Kinkos-equivalent with a thumbdrive.

AdamK:3d printers are pretty awesome, and i've done some research into getting one

but the idea everybody will buy one and print their own stuff is dumb, it'll be like websites or photography or wood carving or drawing or etc. anything that requires enough work that somebody might pay somebody else to do it will become dominated by service businesses

i mean most people still don't like cooking for themselves, and that's farking food son

TV dinner + Microwave = food printer. Sure, it's crap food, but it must sell decently to have its own aisle at the supermarket, eh?

way south:Willas Tyrell: No interest in being able to make my own plastic flatware

Speak for yourself.I don't think 3d printing will be in every home, but I do think it will find a place in millions of garages.You've got countless craftsmen and tinkerers who would happily use this technology to produce trinkets and bits for their projects. Being able to take a design off the internet and personalize it (beyond just adding a monogram) is a hell of a powerful thing.

I think the roadblock right now is complexity more than cost.People just aren't familiar with the tool, but everyone's got stuff they want to make.

I wish I had one last month. When replacing the touch screen on a HP Touchpad I snapped a couple of retaining clips. It still fits together, but you can tell it isn't right.

I would totally pay a couple hundred to have a box that I could go to and print the pieces I broke, or a complete new shell, or the battery covers to all of the remotes that my kid broke when he was a toddler :)

But yeah, not many people are going to think that's worth a couple hundred.

Or maybe... the smart deviants were already everywhere at once -- not the majority, but a decent size of the population -- and the only reason why they didn't do anything back in cave man days was because they spent 99.99% of their waking energy looking for their next meal (the other 00.001% was spent on sex). So when the total mass knowledge and intelligence of the human race is wasted on finding, procuring, preparing and ingesting food, high concepts like art and science tend to not get done.

But as soon as agriculture (and animal domestication) came along, suddenly man could stay in one place and grow/raise more food that he could possibly eat rather than wander around all the time wasting his precious waking energy on hunting. Populations supported by food and wealth booms could thus pursue non-sustenance related activities. From this excess free time came philosophy, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, law, science, music, medicine, art, theatre, writing, trade, language - in short, civilization and all the abstract conceptualizations and liberal arts crap that we enjoy today.

The pace of technological progress is all about food. The less people we have siphoned off for food production, the faster we progress in everything else:

10,000 years ago, 100% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the tribe.5,000 years ago, 80% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the city-state.1,000 years ago, 60% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the kingdom.200 years ago, 40% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the country.Today, less than 10% of our population actively work on feeding the rest of us.

It's not about spreading knowledge or even access to it, it's about idle time.

Scott Adams is right about some things, but he is appallingly ignorant about other things (unless he's trying to be ...

Not yet, as we are still evaluating which one to buy, but it'll happen soon. My business specializes in prototyping for Silicon Valley high tech companies and others here in the Bay Area, so we already have CAD and CAM skills, a large-format CNC milling station, etc. Our projected initial use is to rapidly print low cost parts to prove fitment before going final.

I saw the Objet printers a couple of years ago and was impressed with them, especially since you can mix material types from soft to hard plastic.

However, its very important to note that a 3d printer that you are able to feed scrap plastic will make a significant impact on that as natural resources are more fiercly competed over. an at home machine that can keep re-melting old parts into new ones is probably in humanity's future and a necessary thing.

Beowoolfie:KellyX: I can even imagine local shops that have high end printers and for a small fee you send whatever you want to them and they print and you go pickup that day.

It's already available in many cities, though not well-known yet. A glance at your profile and Google search for prototyping found CPM Fastools in Daytona Beach, for example. :)

Sure they're there, but I'm talking places on every corner (not literally) type of deal that advertises and caters to average people, SEND YOUR FILE AND PICK UP YOUR ITEM IN AN HOUR OR LESS! type deal.

Depending on how advanced these can get, this will change how we buy things online and affect big stores and delivery companies business model too.